“Don’t blame me I’m from Massachusetts,” read bumper stickers on Volkswagen Beetles and Buses and other “sensible” cars after the 1972 election in which Massachusetts was the only state to vote for Senator George McGovern, a thoroughly decent man who was too liberal for a country that preferred President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, an unscrupulous man who now ranks as the second-worse president in my lifetime.

I think people from Massachusetts, which became the sixth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, have always thought highly of themselves. In their honor – and with a nod to former Bay State football player Tom Brady, who, like many Bay State resident moved to Florida, today’s #stampoftheday is a 2-cent stamp, issued in 1930 in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Puritans landing in what became Boston (as opposed to the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth who arrived in Plymouth ten years earlier.)

Unlike many other colonial settlements – including New York – Massachusetts was not founded primarily for commercial purposes (though the colony had its share of astute businessmen). Rather, the state was founded by people who were looking for a place where they would have the freedom to worship as they saw fit. (That didn’t mean they were willing to offer the same privileges to others who wanted to worship in yet a different way).

In addition, since the Puritans believed everyone should be able to read the Bible themselves, they put a particularly high value on education. And so, in many ways, Massachusetts became known both for producing very smart people but also for producing people who were more than ready to let others know that as one of the guiding lights of my life famously said, they were “smarter than the average bear.”

Consider, for example what Herman Melville, a fairly smart man himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the subject of yesterday’s #stampoftheday post. Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had “a defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.” (To be fair, Melville later said Emerson was “a great man”.)

Indeed while we’ve always thought highly ourselves, by the latter part of the 1800s, Massachusetts seems to have become, in many ways, a pretty stultifying place. Narrow-minded Brahmin, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites dominated business and exerted powerful and often restrictive influences on both politics and social mores. The largely Republican Brahmins were regularly it bears mention had a long history of disdain for and distrust of immigrants, including people like my ancestors, who fled pogroms in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. Indeed, a network of notable Brahmins were behind the extraordinarily restrictive immigration laws passed in the 1920s – laws that made it extremely difficult, if not impossible for those trying to flee Nazi repression to get to the US in the 1930s.

The Brahmins’ had particularly intense battles with the state’s many Irish immigrants and their descendants, who tended to be Democrats and Catholics. (Indeed, in the mid 1900s, the Brahmin-dominated Republican Party found success by creating “balanced tickets” that included not only Brahmins but also Italo-Americans, Jews, and Blacks. (Republican Edward Brooke, who represented Massachusetts in the US Senate from 1967 to 1979, was the first Black popularly elected the Senate.)

The Brahmins and the Catholic Church were both socially conservative and banded together to support an intellectually repressive culture exemplified by the well-known phrase “Banned in Boston.” Moreover, it bears mention that in the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio broadcasts often featured anti-Semitic themes, was particularly popular among many in Boston’s Irish-American community.

Things began to change in the post-World War II era which saw the emergence of major research universities, the growth of new industries in the state (particularly computers). By the 1960s, things had changed enough that the state voted for McGovern in 1972. (However, the shift was far from complete. A few years later Boston was torn apart by racial violence around court-ordered busing to desegregate its previously segregated publics schools).

Nevertheless, Massachusetts looked appealing about the time I came of age. It seems to me that my parents-who grew up in New York City and Philadelphia-and always lived in the New York area after they were married-never really understood the state’s appeal for me (and for my brother who lived here for about a decade before he died or my sister, who lived here for about a year after she graduated from college. I never understood their seeming wariness but I wonder if it had to do with what Massachusetts might have symbolized when they were younger.

Regardless, I’ve made the state my home and I’ve come to appreciate its wonders and its frustrations. Our winters are too long; our summers are sometimes too hot and humid; sometimes spring forgets to come and fall often is too short. Our housing is way too expensive and, back in the day, our roads were too congested.

Yes, we’ve got a great history and tradition of innovation, intellectual exploration, deep commitments to social justice. But we also can be wedded to tradition, narrow-minded, and continue to benefit from our connections with some deep injustices.

We’re human. But, I believe, there’s also something special in our DNA that makes Massachusetts a good place, at least for me.

So here I am and here Massachusetts still is.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.